Cover Story

Brad’s War

ZOMBIELAND Left, extras run for their lives on the set in Glasgow, Scotland, in the summer of 2011. Right, World War Z’s star and producer, Brad Pitt., Left, BY PETER BROOKER; Right, BY LUKE INMAN; BOTH FROM REX USA.

In World War Z, Brad Pitt’s first attempt to build himself an action franchise, he would try to save the world from zombie domination. But amid delays, on-set drama, and rumors that the budget had ballooned above $200 million and that Pitt had clashed with director Marc Forster, Hollywood began to wonder if Paramount’s thriller was dead on arrival. As the blockbuster finally hits theaters, Laura M. Holson reports on the behind-the-scenes battles, the re-writes and reshoots, and the stakes involved.

The streets were slick with rain on April 13, 2012, when Damon Lindelof climbed the winding road to Brad Pitt’s hillside estate, overlooking Los Angeles. The 40-year-old Lindelof, a screenwriter and a creator of the hit show Lost, had been summoned by his agent to meet Pitt to talk about World War Z—the star’s film based on the 2006 Max Brooks novel—whose release later that year would be delayed. For months, Hollywood gossips had whispered about Pitt’s troubled zombie thriller. Key executives were fired. The movie was over-budget. There were rumors that Pitt, who both produced and starred in the film, had stopped speaking to the director, Marc Forster.

Lindelof told his agent when he called, “I should see something, read a script.”

“No, they just want to meet you cold,” the agent replied.

“They” referred to Pitt and his colleagues from Plan B Entertainment, the actor’s 11-year-old production company. A week earlier Pitt’s respected right hand, Dede Gardner, had called Lindelof to give him a heads-up. “Don’t be nervous or stressed out,” she said of meeting her boss. The morning of the meeting Lindelof received an e-mail asking what kind of coffee he wanted from Starbucks. Arriving at about two P.M., he was escorted to Pitt’s office, a sparsely furnished room with large windows, four chairs, and a table overlooking a parking area and swaying trees. There, Pitt and a grande soy latte were waiting.

“He took me through how excited he was when he read the book, what was exciting for him, the geopolitical aspect of it,” Lindelof said, recounting the meeting over tea at Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica on a sunny Tuesday in January. He said Pitt explained, “ ‘But when we started working on the script, a lot of that stuff had to fall away for the story to come together. We started shooting the thing before we locked down how it was going to end up, and it didn’t turn out the way we wanted it to.’

“My sense of it was he was taking responsibility,” Lindelof went on. Pitt asked him to watch a recent edit. “The thing we really need right now is someone who is not burdened by all the history that this thing is inheriting, who can see what we’ve got and tell us how to get to where we need to get,” the actor said. Two weeks later, Lindelof was seated in Screening Room 5 on the Paramount lot, where he watched a 72-minute edit of World War Z. The ending was abrupt, an incoherent montage of footage smashed together. But there was something else about the movie gnawing at him when the lights came up.

Where was the other 50 minutes?

“It’s a Zombie Movie”

This year’s crop of big-budget blockbusters have seen more than their share of drama. Disney’s The Lone Ranger was shuttered in pre-production after the original budget soared to nearly $250 million, forcing Johnny Depp and others to defer their fees. 47 Ronin, starring Keanu Reeves as an outcast turned samurai, was delayed a year as its cost reportedly ballooned to $225 million—from $175 million—because of the fumbling of a novice director. And who could forget last summer’s expensive mishaps, Disney’s $250 million John Carter and Universal’s $220 million Battleship? But no movie has gotten more tongues wagging than World War Z, Brad Pitt’s first foray as the star and producer of his own potential franchise, which, one could argue, he has avoided in his career like a zombie plague.

Since 2006, when Paramount optioned the book for Plan B, four successive writers have been hired to overhaul the script, an experienced producer and an Oscar-winning visual-effects artist have left the project, and the filmmakers have shot and thrown out an expensive 12-minute climactic battle scene, which they have replaced with a re-written, reshot, scaled-down ending, upping the movie’s budget to more than $170 million. Paramount admits to that amount, which means the real figure is probably higher—sources from rival studios say that the actual number is more like $210 million, while others, reveling in Paramount’s misfortune, gloat that the budget is closer to $250 million. (Paramount denies both of these higher estimates.) World War Z will hit theaters this month, six months later than expected. If Paramount and Pitt are lucky, the studio and its financial partners will earn back the movie’s costs plus more. If not, Paramount will go down as having made the most overpriced zombie movie in Hollywood history.

Though the impetus to make World War Z reflects the economics of today’s Hollywood, where studios rely on a predictable stream of franchises based on either well-known characters or proven brands anchored by a movie star with international appeal, everyone involved in the movie had a different motivation for making it. Paramount has lost lucrative business partnerships with DreamWorks and its sibling, DreamWorks Animation, as well as Marvel Entertainment—although it retains distribution rights to four Marvel movies, the first two Iron Man movies, Captain America, and Thor—which means the studio needs to create new franchises. (The Walt Disney Company bought Marvel in 2009.) Marc Forster, whose artistic temperament seems best suited to contained emotional dramas like Stranger than Fiction and Finding Neverland, hopes to rebuild his action-movie cred after being skewered by critics for the James Bond sequel Quantum of Solace. (The Wall Street Journal called Quantum of Solace a “model of mediocrity.” Slate wrote that Forster had “no feel for action sequences.”)

Bearing the weight of their expectations is Pitt, who has undeniable global appeal despite an acting career comprising as many admirable misses as hits. He’s been nominated for four Academy Awards, but he’s never won. More recent outings, including Killing Them Softly, The Tree of Life, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, have failed to entice moviegoers in large numbers, who instead swoon whenever Pitt plays a masculine hero like Achilles in Troy or John Smith in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, or delight in his devilish charm in ensemble films, such as the Ocean’s franchise and Inglourious Basterds.

His career as a producer is less distinguished. Plan B is known mostly for producing small, moody dramas (Killing Them Softly among them) directed by eclectic filmmakers. At Paramount, Plan B had never attempted anything as big as World War Z. Dede Gardner, president of Plan B since 2003 and a former Paramount executive, defended Pitt and their company, saying, “He produced Eat Pray Love with me, which was a pretty big movie.” That said, creating a special-effects-driven action blockbuster with the scope and size of World War Z demands a different set of skills than those needed for an emotional travelogue starring Julia Roberts.

Every movie is modified one way or another: script revisions are common and studios are increasingly shooting additional footage after principal photography is done. And other movies with troubled pasts have gone on to reap big rewards. Apocalypse Now was supposed to be shot in a few months but dragged on for more than a year after its star, Martin Sheen, had a heart attack and the set was shut down due to a typhoon. That movie is considered a masterpiece of 1970s filmmaking. Gone with the Wind was delayed for two years, subjected to numerous re-writes, and shot by no fewer than three directors. It won eight Oscars. But those involved with World War Z acknowledge that its ambitions are less epic, more commercial. “It’s a zombie movie,” said Ian Bryce, one of the producers. “They go around and bite people.” Still, no one, least of all Brad Pitt, can afford to let World War Z fail.

Trial by Fire

Like all good dramas, World War Z started with a fight.

In the summer of 2006, Plan B and Appian Way, Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company, were locked in a bidding war over the movie rights to Brooks’s book World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. Each had been sent a manuscript of the geopolitical thriller that documented a zombie apocalypse via a series of detailed first-person accounts. It was atypical movie fare—fashioned after Studs Terkel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Good War—and written as an allegory for how self-interested countries would react to a global pandemic. “I was surprised they cared about the proj ect,” said Brooks, who is the son of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft and has written two books about zombies. “There was no glitter.” Pitt prevailed, and Paramount acquired the book rights for Plan B for about $1 million, according to studio sources.

Plan B hired J. Michael Straczynski, a well-regarded screenwriter of horror and science fiction (he is best known for creating the television show Babylon 5), to write the adaptation. “It felt very much in his wheelhouse, and he was incredibly articulate about it,” said the 45-year-old Gardner, who studied English at Columbia University in the late 1980s and cited Laura Ingalls Wil der as her first literary influence.

At about the same time, Pitt sent Marc Forster a copy of the book. The two had tried to develop a movie about a man afflicted with AIDS, which didn’t go anywhere, and this new proj ect intrigued Forster. “There is no better metaphor than the walking dead as, sort of, the unconscious,” said Forster in a January interview. Society is numb to overpopulation and consumerism, issues he said could be explored thematically with mindless zombies. “In that sense I found you have an incredible opportunity to make a blockbuster movie that has some sort of substance.” In 2008, at Pitt’s urging, Forster was hired to direct World War Z.

Marc Forster is tall and slender, 43, often clad in black pants and a snug zippered hoodie. He is economical with words and prone to awkward silences, something he chalks up to his German-Swiss background. “I’m very … more quiet, less spoken,” he said. His 2002 breakout, Monster’s Ball, a $4 million film, was an artistic triumph where he coaxed an Oscar-winning performance out of Halle Berry as the wife of a man on death row. In 2008, Forster directed his first blockbuster, Quantum of Solace, which earned $586 million at the global box office but was panned by some critics for its cold detachment and lack of visceral thrill.

From the start, Forster’s approach to the material clashed with Stra czyn ski’s. “Marc wanted to make a big, huge action movie that wasn’t terribly smart and had big, huge action pieces in it,” said Stra czynski. “If all you wanted to do was an empty-headed Rambo-versus-the-zombies action film, why option this really elegant, smart book?”

Zombie films are typically low-budget endeavors, despite the mainstream popularity of television shows like AMC’s The Walking Dead. Back in 2002, 28 Days Later, directed by Academy Award winner Danny Boyle, re-energized the zombie-horror genre with its virus-infected monsters and engaging plot. It was financed for only $8 million and earned almost $83 million worldwide. All owe a debt to George A. Romero’s 1968 classic, Night of the Living Dead, which was cited by the Library of Congress in 1999 for its cultural significance. But even that movie, which some film historians surmised was a critique of 1960s culture and the Vietnam War, was filmed for an estimated $114,000, which, adjusted for today’s inflation, would come to a paltry $742,130.

In December 2008, Straczynski said, he turned in another draft of World War Z, pumping up the action to make it more palatable to Forster. Apparently, it didn’t stand a chance. “They slammed the door so hard in my face it came off the hinges,” said Stra czynski. Forster claimed he was unaware of tension with the writer. “I personally had no animosity,” he said. Max Brooks’s book, he explained, did not offer the real-time urgency the filmmakers wanted. Instead, Plan B hired Matthew Michael Carnahan, notable for political dramas like The Kingdom and Lions for Lambs, to re-write the script.

Carnahan deviated significantly from Brooks’s book, scrapping the first-person accounts and basing the story on a former United Nations field specialist and family man named Gerry Lane, who was not a character in Brooks’s manuscript but was borrowed from Straczynski’s draft. The movie became an action adventure, with Lane forced to leave his wife and two daughters to hopscotch the globe seeking a cure to save the world from zombie domination. That struck a chord with Pitt. “It felt exciting to think about: Can we make a global thriller that is also a zombie movie?” said Gardner. In 2010, Pitt agreed to star.

Paramount was thrilled. Now Pitt, Paramount’s most famous producing partner and an international celebrity, would have a franchise of his own. “The idea of Brad saving the world from zombies and going back to his wife and kids, yeah, that’s interesting to me,” said Brad Grey, chairman and chief executive of Paramount Pictures, who had wooed Plan B to the studio in 2005. But Grey also had a personal reason to back Pitt’s proj ect; the actor is a close friend and Grey had co-founded Plan B with him, along with Pitt’s then wife, Jennifer Aniston. (Grey sold his stake when he joined Paramount in 2005. Aniston sold hers the same year.)

Paramount originally agreed to green-light the film with a budget of about $150 million, said studio executives, an eye-popping sum for a horror film and even more so for the zombie genre. Because the story took Pitt around the world, the movie would be easy to market internationally, executives reasoned. And Paramount planned to convert the movie into 3-D, a big draw for Russian, Brazilian, and Chinese audiences, which meant the studio could earn a substantially higher price over regular tickets. Indeed, China, which limits the number of foreign movies imported yearly, is so important that, Paramount said, the filmmakers deleted a reference to intercepted e-mails from China, where, in Brooks’s book, the zombie scourge originates. Rob Moore, vice-chairman of Paramount Pictures, said the film has not yet been screened by Chinese censors. But, he said, “China has become the second-biggest market, and we evaluate how things play there.”

At the same time, Brad Grey acknowledged that Marc Forster had limited experience directing a big-budget blockbuster the scope and size of World War Z. So, to protect the studio’s financial investment and that of their partners, Paramount surrounded Forster and Pitt (as a producer) with a highly trained crew experienced with making expensive, special-effects-driven action movies. “What you want to do, in my judgment, is breed more producers and directors who know how to make these pictures,” said Grey. “That is not an easy thing to do. Mistakes can be made if you don’t have experience. But I think it’s good, when all is said and done, to learn trial by fire.”

Monster’s Ball

World War Z began principal photography in Malta on June 20, 2011. Despite the studio’s overall enthusiasm, the movie’s third act needed a significant re-write. “The script felt good, maybe not great,” said Adam Goodman, president of the Paramount Film Group. In the early scripts, the narrative had three main action sequences involving Pitt: the first in Philadelphia, where Gerry Lane and his family first encounter the zombies; another in Israel; and a final battle in Russia, where the undead lay siege to Moscow’s Red Square but are beaten back by an army of thousands, who, enslaved by the Russians, are forced to fight in ragtag battalions, lopping off the heads of the surging zombies with shovel-like weapons called lobos, short for “lobotomizers.” The Russia battle not only was the pivotal action scene for the movie’s ending but also set up Gerry Lane as a leader in the war against the zombies for potential sequels. But, for some, the story’s ending was too dark. Carnahan’s early script concluded with Gerry Lane in North Korea, appealing to world diplomats to invade the overrun United States with an army of lobo-wielding peacekeepers. Supervising the script revision at Pitt’s behest were Dede Gardner and her Plan B colleagues, as well as Marc Forster, according to a person with knowledge of those discussions. (Carnahan declined to comment for this article.)

Malta, an island south of Sicily which is prized for its parchment-colored terrain, substituted for Jerusalem, where, in the movie’s second major action sequence, zombies clamber over high walls constructed to keep them out, overtaking panicked crowds with the abandon of a ferocious pack of wild dogs. It was an ambitious and costly action scene central to the movie’s narrative; Gerry Lane would flee the zombie invasion in Jerusalem and escape to Russia. More than 45 tons of equipment and props were flown in and 25 full shipping containers were sent to Malta for the three-week shoot, according to Maltese news reports. And 900 extras were hired, which meant that, including the cast and two separate film crews, about 1,500 people were on set many days.

Creative choices, though, proved challenging. “If you try to create mass hysteria, it can’t be blissful,” said Forster. The filmmakers opted to forgo building sets because the studio found locations large enough to accommodate the hundreds of extras fleeing the zombies, according to studio executives. The original Malta location, though, was moved to the crowded waterfront docks of its bustling capital, Valletta. “It was quite a logistical headache,” the movie’s Malta production manager, Winston Azzopardi, said of the shoot, adding, “Truthfully, I don’t think we were fully prepared.”

The move caused anxiety among the crew because, as one insider put it, “it came late in the day.” With two film crews sometimes working side by side, helicopters flying overhead, and hundreds of extras milling around, it was a challenge to manage the schedule. Filming was disrupted one day when a restaurant demanded that it be permitted to stay open after the street was closed, said Marc Evans, Paramount’s president of production, the executive overseeing the film. And Gardner was forced to intervene when one of the actresses trashed her hotel room—the producers worried she would not show up on set, according to a person told of the incident.

In addition, the swollen ranks of extras triggered a cascade of unanticipated costs. “Little, tiny things you can absorb on a small movie,” said Adam Goodman. “But on a movie the scale of World War Z they are costly things that add up.” Costumes for more than 150 extras dressed as Hasidic Jews had to be flown in from Israel, said a crew member, with the remaining extras outfitted at considerable expense. And Evans said Forster lost several hours of shooting one day because a caterer did not prepare enough food for the extras. “We were feeding half the city,” said Azzopardi. The movie “started out small, then grew into a monster.”

A Violent World

From the beginning, Paramount demanded that World War Z have a PG-13 rating, so it could be broadly marketed. But Pitt pushed the boundaries of R-rated violence and gore despite the PG-13 the filmmakers were contractually bound to deliver. “There was always a challenge to keep it PG-13, where Brad wanted to go for it,” said a person involved in the film. “The question was: How graphic can it be and get the rating?” Pitt, that person said, was concerned mostly with aesthetics. “He just wanted it to be cool.”

That’s not surprising, given Pitt’s attitude toward movie violence. “We live in such a violent world,” he told reporters in Cannes while promoting his 2012 gangster movie, Killing Them Softly. He also said, “Murder is an accepted possibility when you are dealing in crime. I would have a much harder time playing a racist or something along those lines. It would be much more unsettling for me than a guy who shoots another guy in the face.”

Dede Gardner said the intent was always a PG-13 rating. Paramount, though, was keeping watch. Marc Evans said he called Gardner in Malta one day after reviewing footage of a particularly graphic zombie attack. “I’m certain I had a conversation about PG-13 coverage,” he said. “I saw the dailies.”

In mid-July, the cast and crew left Malta for England and Scotland. In the first week of August, Evans said, he got a call from one of his production executives. We have a problem, the executive said.

While closing down the production in Malta, the wrap-up crew found a stack of purchase orders related to the cast and extras that had been casually tossed into a desk drawer and forgotten. Evans was gobsmacked; the amount totaled in the millions of dollars. He told Goodman right away. Then, he said, he arranged a conference call with Gardner and Colin Wilson, the producer hired to oversee the movie’s physical operations. Wilson was a personal friend of Goodman’s and an experienced producer, having worked on blockbusters like The Lost World: Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds, and Troy. Evans calls the overages an “unthinkable action” which needed to be addressed immediately.

“It was literally insane,” he said. “Adam [Goodman] and I believed we’d gotten out of Malta good, and I found out we weren’t. That is a nightmare.”

The movie had only begun filming and was now over-budget. And the script’s ending was still unresolved. “Brad was saying, ‘You have to figure out the third act,’ ” said the person apprised of Pitt’s discussions with Gardner and others. One concern was the finale and the big action sequence, which studio executives said was “evolving.” While the filmmakers liked the showdown with the zombies, they decided not to re-unite Gerry Lane with his wife and children after the Russia battle, a cliff-hanger that could be played out over future movies. In an early script, there was a subplot involving a rival male. “I was always like, You should not bring them together,” said Forster. “If you look at my movies, I like it more that they shouldn’t be together.”

On August 9, 2011, Paramount announced that it would release World War Z in theaters on December 21, 2012, giving it a prime spot over the busy Christmas holiday. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the cast and crew were buzzing that Colin Wilson had fallen out with Paramount and was resigning. “Someone needs to be responsible for the start of the movie,” said Goodman of his friend. “And how things were going, he felt as though the crew lost confidence in him or he had lost confidence in himself.”

Wilson, who is currently head of production at Annapurna Pictures, the production company owned by Megan Ellison, did not return phone calls. But some people involved with the movie said that he was unduly singled out and that the financial problems in Malta were indicative of a more serious communication breakdown on the set. “Everyone was covering their backside because they knew they were over-budget,” said one of the people. “And we were wondering how to do the third act.”

Marc Forster said he was unaware of the budget issue until Wilson told him he was leaving, and he later discussed it with Gardner. “No one came to me and said, ‘You are fucking up here,’ ” Forster said. “So if there are any issues budgetarily, they are not my issues.”

He says producers often don’t tell directors about problems, worried it will hamper the artistic process. “You don’t know the shit going on behind closed doors because you don’t want ‘Oh my God! Oh my God! What’s going on?’ ” Forster said. “You are having a meltdown while you are working. So I don’t usually know what is going on. Of course, I know what is on set. If you look at directors, they are always protected—the producers only let you know so much.”

Chaos and Disarray

I an Bryce was on vacation in San Diego with his wife and children on August 18 when Adam Goodman called his cell phone. Fans of Transformers know Bryce’s work even if they don’t know his name: he keeps the director, Michael Bay, on schedule and on budget. (He also was nominated for an Academy Award for Saving Private Ryan and has a producing deal with Paramount.) The 56-year-old Bryce is one of a coterie of Hollywood producers skilled in managing the finances and sprawling physical production of global blockbusters and franchise properties, experience that has become increasingly vital as novice directors and producers enter the ranks of big-budget filmmaking.

He is compact and trim, a no-nonsense straight talker born in England who displays a deadpan practicality rare in Hollywood. Goodman, said Bryce, explained that Colin Wilson had resigned.

“We need somebody right away,” said Goodman.

“Who’s on your list?” Bryce asked.

“You are the list,” Goodman replied.

Four days later, Bryce arrived in Glasgow, where the crew shot the scene of Gerry Lane and his family first encountering zombies in Philadelphia. (The filmmakers picked Glasgow because it was cheaper to film there than in the United States.) After a 17-hour day of meetings with the cast and crew, he got back to his hotel and found his e-mail account chock-full of messages.

“I had 229 e-mails for the day, right?” Bryce said, recounting the incident as he leaned back in his chair in a conference room in the Technicolor building on the Paramount lot. “And it was mostly World War Z stuff.” Movie sets, in his experience, function best when people talk to one another, he said. So before Bryce crawled into bed, he got a list of department heads and senior crew members and sent an e-mail of his own. “If anyone is up for a new way of doing things, here’s my phone number,” Bryce said he wrote. “Here is my assistant’s phone number. Call me. I can talk faster than I can type.” It didn’t take long for people to respond. “It got some immediate hit backs of ‘Hooray!’ ” he said. “ ‘I’ll call you in the morning!’ ”

But the problems on set were far from over. Forster clashed with John Nelson, the senior member of the crew hired to oversee visual effects; Nelson had won an Academy Award for Gladiator and had worked on Iron Man and two of the Matrix movies. “John Nelson and I, it was a chemistry thing,” said Forster. (Citing “creative differences,” Forster said Nelson was replaced after principal filming ended. Nelson declined to comment.)

Forster’s relationship with Pitt was tested, too. “I think every director and actor have to find their shared vocabulary,” said a person with knowledge of the relationship. “Marc does have this great worldview, but he can’t articulate the ins and outs of scenes.” And the two were stylistic opposites, that person said. Forster was focused primarily on filming what was in the script in the allotted days. Pitt, by contrast, wanted to chew over scenes long after the cast and crew had gone home. “Marc didn’t have a lot to offer, and Brad probably shut him down a bit,” said that person. Pitt did not talk to Vanity Fair for this article.

Forster said he had heard Pitt liked to talk a lot, but denied there had been tension with Pitt on set, as did Gardner. “Even the rumor Brad and I were not talking, I said, ‘Where did that come from?’ ” said Forster. “ ‘What is this about?’ I never had any negative communication with him. I mean, who says something like that? Because it can’t come from him, and it doesn’t come from me.”

Forster contends, as did Bryce, that a certain amount of disarray on a movie the size of World War Z is normal. But there is a sentiment among a number of people interviewed that the film suffered from a lack of leadership exhibited by Forster and Plan B. “At some point you have to have a ‘Come to Jesus’ moment,” said a person involved in the movie. “Someone at the top says, ‘This is chaotic.’ But usually someone takes charge.” Gardner bristled when asked if she believed World War Z was more challenging to produce than other movies. “Well, I obviously haven’t done another big movie like this, but, no, I don’t,” she said.

Rambo Versus the Zombies

The movie, despite being over-budget, seemed back on track in the fall of 2011, when the World War Z cast and crew moved to Budapest for 17 days to shoot the climactic Russian battle scene. But at dawn on October 10, a SWAT team from Hungary’s counterterrorism unit raided a warehouse in Vescés, a suburban town near Budapest’s Ferenc Liszt International Airport. There, according to local news reports at the time, officers seized about 85 weapons, including machine guns, handguns, grenades, and other firearms that had arrived two days earlier on a flight from London to be used in World War Z’s final battle. The weapons had not been fully disabled, claimed officials from the counterterrorism unit at a press conference. Screws that had been placed in the barrels of the guns to prevent them from being shot were easily removed with a key. To prove their point, Hungarian officials took two guns from their crates, dismantled the screws, and fired the weapons at a target; the footage of the test aired on local television.

Dede Gardner heard about the weapons seizure from Ian Bryce. “I thought, Really? Come on,” she said. Gardner chalked it up to gossip-hungry reporters and the Hungarian counterterrorism unit’s desire for publicity. “It was just silly,” she said. “It got over-reported. The guns came in, they came in on a weekend, and this anti-terrorist unit came and took the guns and called in the press.” A year and a half later, Gardner still sounded annoyed. “It is a very normal hiccup on a big production,” she said. “Things like that happen every day.”

Well, Gardner was right about one thing. The story about the seized guns was picked up worldwide; a Google search of the words “Brad Pitt guns seized World War Z” turned up 18,200 results. Four months later the anti-terrorist unit dropped the case, but, already, World War Z was attracting bad press.

Paramount, burned by overruns in Malta, began to more closely scrutinize finances in Budapest and demanded that costs be trimmed. “We did not give them extra money,” said Adam Goodman. “When you are that deep in production and your budget has taken hits along the way, you put it back on the filmmakers and say, ‘You’ve got to absorb those hits and figure out how to make the best with what you have here.’ ” One scene where Gerry Lane escaped from an underground prison factory was scrapped due to budget constraints, said Marc Evans. An expensive water gag, in which oversize containers of cold water were dumped on the zombies, was scuttled, too.

By all accounts it was a challenging few weeks. Filming began most nights at about nine, according to people there, and continued until dawn, the temperature sinking to below freezing, as hundreds of extras sparred with phantom zombies who would be added later via computer. “It was a hard shoot because we were constantly rehearsing and coming up with different ways of killing people,” said Simon Crane, the second-unit director, adding, “We didn’t have a lot of time to do it. We had 750 extras not used to being on a film set, fighting an imaginary opponent.”

But even if Paramount had turned their pockets inside out, it might not have mattered. The Russian battle set up Brad Pitt as a warrior hero hacking his way through the bodies of the undead, not as the sympathetic family man he had portrayed earlier in the filming, fighting the zombies so he could get home to his family. “Russia never worked,” said a person with knowledge of the film. Said Crane of the Russia sequence, “It wasn’t character-driven anymore.” The filmmakers, he said, “really needed to think about what they wanted to do with the third act.”

In one scene in the script, Pitt lagged behind a row of older and sick people who appeared to be a protective shield against the zombie onslaught, a move some studio executives worried made the star appear unsympathetic. “In my mind it wasn’t shot that way,” said Evans. But, he added, “we definitely talked about the idea.”

World War Z, it seemed, had turned into Rambo versus the zombies, just as J. Michael Straczynski, the first screenwriter, had predicted. On November 4, 2011, the weary crew wrapped, and Marc Forster returned to Los Angeles to begin editing.

A Hero Will Rise

‘For me, it’s like, I had a good time on this film,” Forster said as he tucked into a plate of soft tacos in a quiet booth at the Café at Paramount earlier this year. “I didn’t feel like it was a big drama. I feel like, yes, the ending didn’t work. Yes, we all thought it was going to work. Yes, we decided it’s not the right ending. Yes, we decided to change it and spend more money. Yes, it never happened to me before on any of my other movies. But I think this movie is more original and bigger and more special than I have ever done before.”

Forster was ruminating about the afternoon of February 2, 2012, when he first showed Paramount executives his director’s cut of World War Z. It was three months after principal filming had ended, and the studio was anxious to see what it had paid for. After more than two hours, the lights came up. The room was silent. “I was in my own head for a minute,” said Marc Evans. “It was, like, Wow. The ending of our movie doesn’t work.” The battle overwhelmed, with Gerry Lane lost in a crimson muddle of severed limbs and bodies. “I believed in that moment we needed to reshoot the movie,” he said.

Adam Goodman spoke. He liked the first hour, he said, but “my concern was, when I saw that first director’s cut, we had gotten to a place where (a) it was less suspenseful than I would hope for a movie that is basically a horror premise and that (b) it didn’t allow for a sense of a triumphant ending, something you could get behind.” After 10 minutes of polite discussion everyone left. “We were going to have long, significant discussions to fix this,” said Evans.

Everyone had a similar reaction. Pitt saw it the next day with Forster. “He said, ‘It’s such a big movie. It’s overwhelming. I want to see it again on my own to digest it a little more and then we’ll discuss it,’ ” Forster recalled. Dede Gardner was publicly optimistic, but privately she expressed a more dismal view. According to one person aware of her reaction after the screening, Gardner said, “It was the worst day of my life.” (Gardner contends it wasn’t the worst day, which she says would be reserved for a loved one’s death.)

There was much at stake if Forster and Pitt delivered a flop. With a cost that had climbed to what rivals are now saying is more than $210 million, Paramount would have to spend another $125 million to $150 million to globally market the film, according to a person familiar with the budget. And that did not include the additional $8 million to $15 million needed for the 3-D conversion. This meant the movie would have to take in around $400 million at the worldwide box office for Paramount and its financial partners to break even, the person said. (Paramount negotiated deals with Pitt and its 3-D partners to be paid certain moneys after financial targets were met.)

On March 13, the studio announced that it would push World War Z’s December 2012 release to June 21, 2013. Then, in April, Damon Lindelof, after meeting with Pitt at his home, found himself on the Paramount lot watching the 72-minute edit of World War Z. After seeing the director’s cut in February, Paramount had hired two new editors to streamline the story, studio executives said, so what Lindelof was shown was a drastically pared-down version, which didn’t include the footage from Budapest and other scenes. This, he was told, was so his “mind would be uncluttered by something they real ly didn’t want to have.” After the screening, he asked to see the footage left out.

In much of the 72-minute edit, Lindelof said, “I thought Brad was really playing the Everyman thing. He wasn’t doing karate and chopping off the heads of zombies.” But after Gerry Lane left Israel for Russia, the story shifted to Lane as a calculated zombie killer. What the ending of World War Z needed was for its hero to be re-united with his wife and children. “He has to ‘save the world’ to get back to his family,” said Lindelof, adding, “It is an emotional task.”

Lindelof, Gardner, and another colleague from Plan B went to a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf on the Paramount lot to talk. “I said to them, There are two roads to go down here,” said Lindelof. “Is there material that can be written to make that stuff work better? To have it make sense? To have it have emotional stakes? And plot logic and all that? And Road Two, which I think is the long-shot road, is that everything changes after Brad leaves Israel.” That meant throwing out the entire Russian battle scene—or about 12 minutes of footage—and crafting a new ending.

“I didn’t think anyone was going to say, ‘Let’s throw it out and try something else,’ ” Lindelof said. “So when I gave them those two roads and they sounded more interested in Road B”—which meant shooting an additional 30 to 40 minutes of the movie—“I was like, ‘To be honest with you, good luck selling that to Paramount.’ ”

Lindelof wrote a long e-mail to Plan B, Pitt, and Paramount executives outlining his thoughts. That triggered a studio meeting. “They completely and totally embraced the emotional ideas and the character ideas that were going to really help center the movie on Gerry and prevent him from spinning off into ‘save the world’ syndrome,” said Lindelof. But Adam Goodman made it clear he wasn’t interested in salvaging the Russia scene. “ ‘What if you were to come up with something different?,’ ” Lindelof said Goodman asked him. “I was like, Wow.” Not only would that be expensive but he would have to deliver the new ending in about three weeks.

Forster was present for the discussions, said Lindelof, but remained mostly quiet. “My sense of it was not that Marc had been pushed aside but was willingly letting the machine of Plan B, which was riding point, take action,” he said. “This was what they wanted to do, and he was allowing it to happen.”

Lindelof said he enlisted the help of a friend, Drew Goddard, with whom he had worked on Lost. In June the two holed up in an editing bay on the Paramount lot where they had access to all the World War Z footage; an adjoining room was outfitted with two whiteboards where they outlined new material to be incorporated into existing footage. Dede Gardner visited and they pitched her ideas, Lindelof said. (Moviemaking by committee is how one Paramount executive described the process.) After about 10 days—and with input from Paramount and Pitt—Lindelof said, he and Goddard began to write, delivering about 60 pages before the July 4 holiday.

Two months later, Paramount agreed to green-light the new ending. At the same time, the studio hired Oscar winner Christopher McQuarrie, who had recently written and directed the Tom Cruise movie Jack Reacher, for Paramount, to remain on set and revise the script as needed. (McQuarrie declined to comment.) Shooting began in October 2012 in London.

Absent from the reshoot were the huge action spectacles that intrigued Marc Forster. Instead he was back to his dramatic roots, which had first caught Pitt’s eye. “It was a different setting,” Forster said of the additional shooting. “The maximum amount of actors or human beings on that set were 20.” Filming finished with little fanfare on December 3, 2012. (Reshoots are rumored to have cost about $20 million.) By February of this year, Paramount was breathing easier. According to studio executives, Forster had prepared a two-hour version of World War Z that showed promise. Brad Grey had not seen it yet but was optimistic. “I wouldn’t suggest I’m a fan of zombies,” he said. “But I’m a fan of Brad Pitt.”

He told a story about Joseph E. Levine, the legendary movie mogul who owned Embassy Pictures. (It was Levine who once commented, “You can fool all of the people if the advertising is right.”) Grey recalled the time Levine watched The Graduate with the director Mike Nichols. Levine was distributing the film, and after the screening was over, he turned to Nichols and said, “I smell money.”

The Paramount chairman said he would invite Pitt to watch World War Z with him soon. “Maybe I will re-enact that with Brad,” Grey said, laughing a little too heartily.